What are the drawbacks, if any, to exchanging links with sites with low/no PR?

You don't get much in return?

You don't get penalized if that's what you mean.

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vBulletin mods | vBulletin SEO | vBWeather| Easy Contest

ok, thank you Code Monkey

It's sort of like a short term retirement program for your site.

If they pay off, it'll pay off good in a year or two

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And a site is not there to have a pr, content is what will make it a success, and to link just to have pr links.... if it is in no way related to your topics.. people coming over will just go away as quickly...

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Aeroclix -- DistantHost link directory
Domains hosting, server rent... -- Distant-Help link directory

While I've hit the SEO thing quite hard, I'm beginning to think that excessively overthinking it is a bad idea.

Get links. It's about as simple as that. If you go out of your way to build links with black hat tricks and such, you may get banned (or make millions). If you don't do any work to get links, you'll probably never rank.

If you link to sites for linking purposes alone, you have done no good to you or your visitors. If a site has a reason to be linked to, I link to it. That's it. I never question the SEO ramifications of linking to a useful site because there are no negative consequences.

However, the fatal flaw with the whole SEO thing is to really rank for the big terms, it would cost a fortune. Assuming you spent a $1,000,000 on links at digitalpoint or textlinkads, you still wouldn't rank for music download or real estate.

To really rank for big terms, it takes about $5,000,000 worth of "free" links or at least links that you didn't directly pay for.

We dumped $13k into SEO for a site for payday loans and our returns have been...well....horrible. Of course, we paid a high end firm to do it (thinking they would do a good job). All they did was submit to directories...lots of them. They bought one authority link for $300 per month. That was it. The traffic has been almost non-existant.

In my experience thus far, people only link to things they can't recreate on their own site in a reasonable amount of time. Great videos can't be recreated and therefor need to be linked to. Great articles....well you can take the 3 main points of any great article and rewrite it into a blog. I don't think great articles will snag big links.

I think the real money is in creating tools with php, java, etc. People have no problem linking to tools. There is no way to recreate what a tool does on a site without physically installing the tool on your site. Of course, the benefit of being the first to make this tool is lost.

I think the digitalpoint forums illustrate the power of tools in an extraordinary way.

The site has had no SEO done to it. It is a site that sells software. Oh, by the way, we'll put this little forum up in a dark corner of the site. Keep in mind that selling software is not even directly related with a webmaster forum. In fact, it's about like putting a webmaster forum on a spa site or something...well....almost.

Before you know it, that forum is the largest webmaster forum online (probably one of the most competitive keywords online). I've seen the owner, Shawns, Adwords check and it was...well....huge.

How did he do it?
Free Webmaster Tools & Search Engine Optimization Tools

That's how... and he just got ANOTHER link.

Brandon

I had thought about adding a bunch of tool on this site for that Very reason but I quickly realized how much of a strain those tools can put on your server..

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I can take quite some bw and... you have to maintain them to latest... But it is indeed for many sites the motor... Good content like simple howto's for beginners and scripts... seems that is what many look for. Mny ISP now offer some little spot for free and most want to have something up to share... and it ain't easy when you start.
Reason Fantastico is such a success, you can hardly make it easier as host provider...

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Domains hosting, server rent... -- Distant-Help link directory

Think about that one for just a second. Assuming you want to be a big time forum like digitalpoint (or even 1/3 that big) would you rather pay the extra $100-200 for hosting per month or an extra $50,000 per month in purchased links.

Brandon

well right now, I can't afford the extra 100$ a month..lol

but I understand your point ;)

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